eve, that child's unhappy father."

Aroused by this to forget her own sufferings, even to forget for the
moment the dreadful burden borne by the gallows tree, she thrust out
her hand and seized his sleeve.

"Who, then, is the dying man?" she whispered.

"I know not--but--but--for mercy's sake, in memory of the misery you
have suffered, in pity for mine, lead me to this man! You know where
he is; you can do so?"

"Come," she said. "Come. He is in my hut close by. We were very poor,
we had no better. Come. Tie your horse to a tree and follow me."

Dazed, scarce knowing whether he was awake or asleep and dreaming, he
obeyed her, leading the horse away some paces so that it should be no
more frightened by the horrible burden of the gibbet, and following
her through a thicket. In other circumstances he might have feared an
ambush; now, a thousand hidden enemies would not have held him back.

She wound her way along a trodden track leading down into the valley
below, but went only a few score yards when she stopped outside what
was indeed no better than a hut, a wooden building thatched with turf,
from a window in which there gleamed a ray of light. And she, placing
her ears to the door ere she pushed it open, said to him: "He lives
still. You can hear his breathing. Hark!"

"Thank God!" St. Georges said fervently. "Whoever he may be, he will
be able to tell me of the child. Open, I beg you; open in the name of
mercy!"

She obeyed him at once, thrusting the door open and drawing him in,
and then by the light of a miserable, small oil lamp that flickered on
a rude wooden table he saw stretched upon a pallet in a corner of the
place the dying man. Also he noticed that the room reeked and was
fetid with his hot breath and with another hot, dry odour that he knew
was the odour of blood.

In the shadow of the room St. Georges could see a white face, could
also perceive two great staring eyes turned up to the rafters; he
could hear, too, the drawn, labouring breath as it rattled through his
throat and chest, accompanied by a moan as it came forth.

"Quick!" he exclaimed, "quick! The light! He lives still, but his
minutes are numbered. He is dying, dying fast. Where is his wound?"

"In the lower part of his body, through him. A sword thrust. I have
tried to stanch it, but it flows always. I marvel he has lived so
long."

She brought the oil lamp forward as she spoke and held it near the
man, and St. Georges, kneeling